Prisoner of America

I wanted to expose the fact that many understand that we do not live in a just world but they do nothing to fight against it either, which makes them part of the problem. It just shows that you can know something is wrong, but if you chose not to do anything about it, then you have sided with the oppressors

Health needs assessment of short sentence prisoners

Health Needs Assessment of Short Sentence Prisoner

Alaska Prisoner Reentry Task Force Update

The Alaska Prisoner Reentry Task Force, a subcommittee of the Alaska Criminal Justice Working Group (CJWG), focuses on promoting the goal that individuals released from incarceration do not return to custody. This article presents an update on progress on Alaska's Five-Year Prisoner Reentry Strategic Plan, 2011–2016, which was released by Task Force in February 2011.[Introduction] / Regional Reentry Coalitions / Work Groups / Legislative Events — SB 64 Hearing

Forecasting prison populations using sentencing and arrest data

Aim: To develop a method for forecasting the NSW remand and sentenced prisoner populations.Method: Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models with other time series as input variables were employed to estimate and forecast changes in the remand and sentenced prisoner populations. Models were tested by estimating model parameters over the period January 1998 – December 2010 and then comparing model forecasts with actual prison population trends over the period January 2011 – March 2013. Comparison of actual with forecast remand and sentenced prisoner numbers revealed that both models provide fairly reliable predictions of prison population trends over a three year time horizon.Results: Barring any significant change to policing and penal policy, the prison population is expected to rise in the first half of 2013 and then to drop steadily over the next three years. Although modelling suggests an uptrend in the remand prisoner population, this should be more than offset by a decrease in the sentenced prisoner population over the next thirty-three months.Conclusion: Although the models developed here provide accurate forecasts in retrospective testing, they should not be used as the sole basis for projecting future prison numbers. Future projections of prisoner numbers should also be based on advice from correctional administrators, police prosecutors, legal policy analysts, and others on the likely effects of any proposed change to policing, bail or sentence policy. Construction of a simulation model may help in quantifying the effects of these changes.Authored by Wai-Yin Wan, Steve Moffatt, Zachary Xie, Simon Corben and Don Weatherburn

Jones V. Bock: New Clarity Under the Prison Litigation Reform Act

On January 22, 2007, the Supreme Court decided the consolidated cases of Jones v. Bock , Williams v. Overton , and Walton v. Bouchard , all of which were Sixth Circuit cases. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court provided clarity to what constitutes exhaustion of prison grievance procedures under the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (PLRA). The Court\u27s decision also offers its view on the correct way to balance the burden between prisoner plaintiffs and the judiciary, which labors to process prisoner complaints. Broken into three discreet issues, the essential holding provides a small victory for prison litigants. First, it determined that a prisoner litigating under the PLRA does not have the burden to plead and demonstrate exhaustion in the complaint. Rather, the defendant must raise lack of exhaustion as an affirmative defense. Second, it addressed whether a prisoner\u27s initial administrative grievance must identify and name all the individuals charged in its complaint. This determination lowered the bar outlined by the Sixth Circuit. Finally, it reviewed whether the PLRA requires dismissal of an entire complaint when some, but not all of the claims asserted have been exhausted. Once again, this issue was decided in favor of prisoners\u27 rights

Ready4Work In Brief: Update on Outcomes; Reentry May Be Critical for States, Cities

This issue of P/PV In Brief provides updated data from the Ready4Work prisoner reentry initiative, with a focus on the prison crisis occurring in many cities and states. While much more research is needed to understand the true, long-term impact of prisoner reentry initiatives, outcomes from Ready4Work were extremely promising in terms of education, employment and program retention, with recidivism rates among Ready4Work participants 34 to 50 percent below the national average.Funded by the US Department of Labor and the Annie E. Casey and Ford foundations, Ready4Work was a three-year national demonstration project designed to address the needs of the growing ex-prisoner population and to test the capacity of community- and faith-based organizations to meet those needs. Ready4Work programs provided employment services, case management and mentoring in 11 adult sites around the country (data from seven juvenile sites are being analyzed separately)

The politics of prisoner legal rights

The article begins by locating human rights law within the current political context before moving on to critically review judicial reasoning on prisoner legal rights since the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998. The limited influence of proportionality on legal discourses in England and Wales is then explored by contrasting a number of judgments since October 2000 in the domestic courts and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the restricted interpretation of legal rights for penal reform and proposes an alternative radical rearticulation of the politics of prisoner human rights

Are people ethical? An experimental approach

Do ethical motivations and attitudes affect behaviour? We examine this issue in six Prisoner´s Dilemma and Prisoner´s Dilemma related games using an online experiment where individuals were asked to make choices and subsequently to express the motivations for their choices and their general attitudes. The experimental evidence of 1,701 students suggests that the motivations and attitudes of respondents regarding altruism, inequality aversion, reciprocity and aversion to lying are important for determining economic choices as well as self-interest. Econometric analysis of the choice to share indicates that ethical and self-interested motives are more important for determining choices than personal characteristics

Identities, Education and Reentry: Performative Spaces and Enclosures

This is part one of a two-part interdisciplinary paper that examines the various forces (discourses and institutional processes) that shape prisoner-student identities. Discourses of officers from a correctional website serve as a limited, single case study of discourses that ascribe dehumanized, stigmatized identities to the prisoner. Two critical concepts, performative spaces and identity enclosures, are purposed as potential critical, emancipatory terms to explore the prisoner-student identity work that occurs in schools and elsewhere in prison. This paper is guided by the effort to assist teachers to act as transformative intellectuals in prisons and closed-custody settings by becoming more aware of the multilayered contexts--the politics of location--that undergird their work. Seeing the bigger picture has implications for how and what educators teach in prison settings and, perhaps, why education works to facilitate reentry. This paper is grounded in normalization theory. Normalization theorists believe prisons can facilitate reentry when they mirror important dimensions of outside life. The performance of multiple, contextualized identities, considered here and examined in more detail in a forthcoming article, serves as an example of how educators mirror normal life by facilitating the performance of different roles for prisoners on the inside